


The Getaway

by theremin



Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-08
Updated: 2021-02-11
Packaged: 2021-03-14 12:53:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29296203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theremin/pseuds/theremin
Summary: On the art of disappearing.
Relationships: Greg Hirsch/Tom Wambsgans
Comments: 13
Kudos: 35





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Posted the germ of this idea on my [tumblr](http://iamtheremin.tumblr.com) but felt like going a little further with it

Greg Hirsch was kissing Tom Wambsgans.

That was definitely happening, unless Tom was dreaming, and it wasn't like his brain wouldn't choose just this kind of avenue to torture him, but it certainly felt real. His lips were pressed to Tom's, both of his hands gripping at Tom's sides. Tom was just stiff and probably experiencing some minor form of shock, but then he heard a very pathetic noise and realised he'd made it, and it appeared to embolden Greg who let slip the tip of his tongue to Tom's bottom lip and then- you know what, fuck it, dream or not dream, this was happening, this was going down my friend. He let both arms a little awkwardly slide up Greg's back, kissed back, and made another whimper when one of Greg's hands came down to grab his ass. It sure was different, this, Tom had never kissed anyone as tall as Greg, of course, it was unlikely anyone had unless a very lonely sailor had an illicit encounter with a moa bird back in the 19th century. But you know what? Tom was having what was very possibly the worst day of his whole entire life, and this, this felt good, fucking weird but good, like a potato chip and banana sandwich, and if this was to be his day on death row, right now he couldn't think of a better way to spend it than in the arms of his cellmate slash sandwich.

Fuck them all. Fuck Shiv. Fuck Logan. Fuck Roman. And fuck Cyd Peach, who might not be present on this day in particular, but just fuck her in general.

Tom wasn't entirely sure where the thread that led to him being kissed by Greg Hirsch had started to unspool, god, it might be all the way back to their first conversation, well, guess he had his answer now, but he really didn't have the fortitude to examine events going any further back than that same day, which definitely was more than enough as that day had included two of the worst experiences of his married life, and let's not, let us _not,_ forget that his married life had started out being told congratulations, Tom, and welcome to the secret society of swingers, leave your trousers and dignity at the door.

Experience 1: being part of some sort of roundtable discussion on who should pull on a white woollen coat, go 'baa' and play sacrificial lamb for the clusterfuck at Cruises. He had known somebody would bring his name up but when Roman threw it out there he still panicked, his palms growing sweaty and his voice high, and then Shiv, beloved Shiv, still quietly pissed at him for not wanting to have a doomsday threesome with the help while her family slept in adjacent cabins, like some kind of Italian post-apocalyptic softcore from 1979, had said, direct quote, 'Tom makes sense'. What. The. Fuck. Even after the past year, the humiliations, the compromises, the lowered expectations, that one hit like a gorilla sized punch in the gut. She didn't even change course, she doubled down, and he caught Greg staring. To anyone else he might look like the same alien eyed blank slate he always did but Tom knew him well enough to see the way his eyes widened at the spectacle, the humiliating spectacle of being left out to dry by the woman who was supposed to have his back. 

So yeah, that was a great start to the day.

Experience 2: clearly trying to placate him and feeling a little guilty, Shiv had asked him to go out to find a cove, spend a little time together, just the two of them. Tom had taken advantage of the goodwill to, well, give her a piece of his mind. It had felt good, and it had felt- horrific. He'd never seen his dad talk to his mom the way he had just talked to Shiv, but then again, he'd never seen his mom take the metaphorical cleavers to his dad's metaphorical ballsack either, so. When they got back she was angry and upset and so was he. So he marched over to Logan, the person who had really put all of them in this gruesome situation, picked up the chicken on his lunch plate and demolished it while looking into the old fucker's eyes.

“Thank you, Logan. Thank you for the chicken,” Tom said, kicked his chair back, put his sunglasses on and licked the grease of his fingers before he strode away from the deck. And walking away, walking away from all of them, all of them no doubt in awe at his courage, his death defiance, he almost felt good, or not even good, he felt high. It didn't last very long. Once he was safely out of view his ice cold, emotionless exterior shattered like glass on impact and he doubled over, then fell to his knees, grabbed the carpet in the hallway and crawled on hands and knees like a dog to the first open door. Said door was an unused guest cabin. Perfect. Whimpering, Tom crawled onto the bed, hugged himself into a ball shape and hyperventilated.

Then, there was a timid knock on the door.

“No thank you!” Tom said. “Go away please!”

“Dude, it’s just me.”

Tom groaned. Of course. Of course it was ‘just Greg’. However, Just Greg was in the shit because of him, so he probably owed him at the very least an apology. He dragged himself out of bed and walked over, opened the door. Greg looked pale - well, extra pale - and worried, and walked past Tom into the room. Tom closed the door behind him.

“I’m not going down,” Greg said. “this isn’t my fault.”

“Kendall is right,” Tom tried to say, reasonably, as much to himself as to Greg. “we don’t really work. We’re not big enough fish.”

“Okay, but if, Tom? If?”

Tom breathed through his mouth, nodded. If.

Greg walked over, close, looked at him with an unreadable expression. Tom wondered if he was going to hit him. It seemed unlikely, and even if he did he couldn’t imagine it feeling much different than being smacked with a balloon, but it had a probability of more than zero.

Greg did not hit him.

So, that's where they were at, and when Greg pulled away from Tom's mouth to breathe, all deep and ragged, Tom felt not like a cuckolded useless middle aged worm, he felt like a fucking golden god. He'd eaten Logan's chicken and now he was going to raw his great nephew right on his boat. Like a boss. He started fumbling with the buttons on Greg's shirt, but Greg batted his hands away.

"Oh, come on, Greg!"

"I just- I just, uh, I just need to ask you something. Something really important."

"What?!"

Greg was silent for a beat, then his eyes went a little dark, a little more determined than he usually looked. "Dude. If it's us. If it's you and me. I'm going to disappear."

Tom laughed, sounded a little hysterical. "You're going to disappear? Wherever to, Gregory?"

“Well, like, obviously I can’t tell you.”

“Oh let me guess Greg. Your mommy’s house? Where the fuck could you go where you wouldn’t be found. Who do you think you are? Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery?”

Greg just shrugged. “Tom. If it comes down to it. Would you come with me?”

“What?”

Greg wrapped his arms around him, pulled him close, and the moment softened. Tom looked up into those inscrutable deep sea creature eyes and there was a warmth there, a warmth and a concern, and for a moment he felt like crying. “Dude. I. Uh. I like, I think I might be, no, I, uh. I’m like, in love with you. Like, very much. So.”

“Oh,” Tom said. He couldn’t think of anything else to say to that. Who the fuck knew Greg had romantic feelings in there? He’d long ago come to the conclusion Gregs procreated by binary fission once they grew tall enough.

“And um. I would just like, to ask you, if you would like to come with me, instead of taking the fall, if it came to that.” A beat. “I’d take care of you, I promise.”

Wouldn't that be a thing. To be taken care of. To be cared for. Tom felt so deflated all of a sudden, his brain and body bereft of feelings and words and actions, he only managed to muster a nod. Greg nodded back, then pressed his cheek to Tom's. "Pack a small bag. Tell Shiv you're sleeping elsewhere. Meet me here tonight. If it comes to it."

"What if it doesn't?" Tom said stupidly.

"Well, I still wanna meet you here, if that's okay with you."

"Haa. Haha. Ah."

Mercifully, Greg didn't try to get anything more coherent out of him, just brushed a large thumb in an arc at Tom's temple, and walked out.

Tom looked after him. Then he pinched his arm, just in case.

*

What do you pack in a "small bag" for when you go on the run from your evil in-laws with the one good egg, the one good Greg, to whatever carton he had in mind? That was the question Tom asked himself when Logan solemnly announced Tom and Greg "made the most sense". They were directly involved with covering it up, they were family "enough" for it to count. Kendall had protested, and Greg had protested, but Tom was thinking about what he would pack. When he made it back to the cabin he got his nice leather messenger bag and went through the mental checklist. An extra change of clothes, two more changes of underwear and socks. His toothbrush, his razor. Not his phone and not his pad, fucking Steve Jobs spy units. His credit cards, but above all the stash of euros. He found about three thousand of them in cash. His passport and driving license.

"What are you doing?"

Tom looked up, and Shiv was in the doorway, when he stuffed the boxer shorts rolled around the wads of cash into the bag. "Just... getting some stuff together."

"Why?"

"I'm sleeping elsewhere tonight," Tom said.

"Tom..."

She had the audacity to cry, but not to try and convince him to stay. She could have saved his ass if she'd talked to her dad, and they both knew it. 

He felt weirdly detached from it all in the guest cabin, looking up into the ceiling. Maybe Greg would come to rescue him, like a knight in plastic flip flops. Maybe he'd go to New York, be put on trial for something he didn't even do. Maybe he'd fucking kill himself. Who knew? Life was full of surprises.

At around two he jerked awake from a knock, still on his back on the bed in his linen suit. His heart raced as the memories came back to him, and he got up, his limbs feeling heavy.

"Ready?" Greg asked. Tom nodded.


	2. Chapter 2

“What do you mean, gone?”

Logan stared.

“We’re very sorry, sir, but we can’t find them anywhere,” a guard told Logan Roy. “we’ve searched the whole boat.”

“Well search it again!”

The guard nodded and briskly walked away. Logan got up, stalked over to where Kendall was sitting, as surprised as everybody else.

“Did you have anything to do with this?”

“What? No.”

“Hmm. So what happened, Kendall? Did the two tallest muppets on Sesame Street grow wings and fly away?”

“I don’t know, dad.”

“We are more than six miles from shore. None of the speed boats or life boats are missing. I think I would have heard a helicopter land. If they’re not here, they must have had help. And who exactly, would help them, Kendall?”

“I don’t know!” Kendall said, put his iced coffee so hard down on the nearest table it splattered all over. A steward silently came over with a wet rag, wiped it down.

*

Greg had the insufferable habit of talking to staff. And not just in the, kind of, normal, I acknowledge you’re human and I remember you from yesterday way, but just, nagging them about details of their life, inane icebreaker questions, wanting their _opinions_ as if that was why they were there. Whenever Tom crossed a Roy property with Greg he could feel like a six year old at the store when his mom would run in to one of her friends and then trade pleasantries for what felt like aeons while the candy aisle taunted him from miles away. “Hey how’s Alice, how is she settling in at college?” “Hey dude, pity about the game last night! Come join the winning side some time, ha ha!” “Hey man good to see you, how did the operation go?” Seriously, what operation? What was the use of retaining all this information? What was the point?

At least, that’s what Tom used to think. When they walked away from the cabin, quietly, Tom must have breathed but in his memory he had held his breath throughout, the staff on the boat – the guard, the captain – simply nodded at them, and then a steward rowed them out for a while to meet another boat which took them to shore, where a rental had been waiting. They’d driven all night and changed cars on the border, visited a different dealership, before entering Slovenia.

They took turns driving, which suited Tom just fine, as it meant they didn’t have to talk. He was currently pretending to sleep while Greg drove the quiet morning roads. He did not want to have a “what are we” conversation with fucking Cousin Greg, even if the question was foremost on his mind. 

What are we? What could we be? What do you want us to be, Tom?

Look, it wasn’t like he hadn’t _thought_ about it. Greg was – okay, he was an attractive guy. He was fine-featured and gentle and tall (big hands big hands) and had a sort of, obsequious and ultimately self-serving need to please which Tom had Thoughts about how. Would work. In other contexts. But having sad and secret masturbatory fantasies about your assistant was one thing, heck, he was a god damn executive in a conservative TV network, it was practically mandatory. Having the attraction _reciprocated_ \- what was he supposed to do with that? His fantasies were strictly office-based (Greg bent over the desk, Greg blowing him while he fired Cyd Peach over the phone, Greg being, like, a naked sushi lady, on the settee – usually a tell it was time to go to lunch). Greg a pathetic, horny, grateful underling who did whatever Tom said. Not- not Greg saving _him_ , not Greg being the brave one. Not- Greg saying “I’m in love with you”, even if he’d said it like an old modem impotently trying to get online. 

What was he supposed to do with that?

The car stopped and Tom jerked awake, apparently he had fallen asleep somewhere. “Uh- uh. What time is it?”

“Around noon.”

“Where are we?” 

“Still in Slovenia. I thought we’d maybe change cars again? What do you think?”

Tom yawned. “I guess the best thing for it would be to buy a car. Something cheap we could ditch.”

“Can we afford that?”

“Not sure. Let’s have a look around.”

They walked out, found a cheap hotel, and a pretty big supermarket. They lugged bags of non perishables (brioche bread with chocolate filling, chips, crackers, canned tuna, canned beans, big jugs of water) into the car. In the hotel, Greg disappeared into the bathroom with something he’d bought.

“What are you doing in there?” Tom asked after what must have been an hour. “Are you trying to figure out how to flush or something? Look for a pedal on the floor.”

“Almost done,” Greg said.

“Are you performing plastic surgery on yourself in there. Ha, ha. Woah!!!” Tom jumped when he saw Greg come out the door – with a new, platinum blonde mane. He ran a towel over it, then tugged on the ends so it hung around his neck. 

“What do you think?”

“Whu- what do I _think?_ ”

“Yeah, pretty different, right?”

“Different? Different? You just made yourself look even more conspicuous. You look like Big Bird at a rave. You look like Angelina Jolie married you for ten minutes back in 1999.”

“No, see, because they’re going to be looking for a dark haired guy.”

Tom shoved the heels of his hands into his eyes. Suddenly, the decision to put his life and destiny into the oversized hands of Gregory Hirsch, seemed like a rather stupid choice. Especially considering the calibre of people who would be looking for them. Oh god. Oh, good god.

*

“I think,” Connor Roy said, eyes scanning to make sure everybody was paying attention. “they’re in the Netherlands.”

“Please tell us more,” Roman said.

“Because,” Connor said, put in a little pause for effect. “they are two above average height gentlemen.”

Roman spluttered a little.

“And, the Dutch, are famously tall.” He swept his hands out. “They would blend _right in._ ”

“That’s true,” Willa said. “they’re so tall they have to have, like, specially made coffins. I read about it.”

“Bravo,” Roman said.

“Also,” Connor said, his tone light but his eyes catching Roman’s. “I am not one to judge another man’s pleasures, but we all know cousin Greg is, you know,” he made a ring with his thumb and forefinger and brought it to his mouth.

“What?” Roman said. “He’s an Italian chef?”

“You know. Mary Jane. The chronic. He’s a pot-head. A lot of that in the Netherlands.”

“The chronic?”

“Yeah,” Willa said supportively.

“Well, I think we’re done here,” Roman said. “Conumbo and Wilson cracked the case wide open. Let’s employ the special Amsterdam bike unit, have them raid the coffee shops.”

“Thank you, Connor. But I’d like to hear from you, Shiv. Where do you think your husband is?” Logan asked his daughter. 

Shiv just made a face, shrugged. She couldn’t even bullshit her way through this one. She didn’t love Tom for his bravery, his recklessness or his spontaneity. She honestly hadn’t been aware those were qualities he even had. Even his stupid, impulsive behavior always had an air of calculation. Not necessarily good calculation – a lot of the time he didn’t get the result he thought he would – but it wasn’t like he hadn’t spent time working on the equation. This, though? This was new.

*

“I like the hair,” Tom said, having decided that he did. They were in the backseat of the car, in a layby near a field in Austria, eating their shitty lunch consisting of brioche and chips and soda. Red little spots of acne had started appearing on Greg’s skin. The car window was rolled down, it was a warm day and the air was fresh and full of insect humming noises, the scent of grass.

Greg tilted his head a little. “I like the mustache. And the beard.” Tom’s hand jerked up to touch it, self-consciously. It had come in pretty quick and thick. 

“I like your face.”

“I like yours.”

Greg smiled, a big dopey smile, and when Tom leaned in he leaned in to meet him. They hadn’t kissed since that time on the boat. That first night on the run, in the double bed of the hotel room, Tom had barely slept a wink, terrified of Greg’s big hands making their way over and being, like, _I saved your ass, now I’m a shareholder,_ something like that, but the guy just slept deeply on his side, sighing and whining a little in his sleep but nothing else. Tom had been relieved, and then he’d been a little offended, but he realized, as Greg’s hand made its way into his pants and he moaned into his mouth, he was probably just giving him a little space. Well. The time had passed for that, Tom thought, as he let a hand slide up Greg’s thigh. 

When they got to Vienna, they found a hotel room, and Greg pushed him down on the bed and went down on him. Twice in a day, Tom thought, looking up at the white painted ceiling. His life really had turned into a James Bond movie.

*

Greg had bought a shitty Android in Hungary, and he was using the hotel wifi to search for their names.

“Anything?” Tom said.

“Just the usual stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“Uh, like the court hearing memes.”

“What memes?!”

Greg looked at him. “Um. No memes. Nothing. Uh, no news, I mean, to say.”

“Good. Great. So, what’s the plan? We lay low until it all blows over?”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Greg said. 

It felt very old school, posting the copies of the salvaged documents in manila envelopes to the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian. Tom had been fairly impressed when he’d seen them – kind of angry at Greg’s insubordination, but mostly impressed – and he’d been lucky. There were documents holding Logan’s own signature, there were documents using the term NRPI and discussing Lester’s transgressions, there were dates, there were names of friendly police authorities in various countries. Greg got back into the car after he’d dropped them off in the mailbox. “Now, we lay low.”

“Sounds good,” Tom said. “so, where are we going?”

“You know?” Greg said. “I really did want to visit Prague that one time.”

“Prague it is.” Tom cleared his throat, put the car into first, drove out on the road. “Hey Greg?”

“Yeah Tom?”

“I love you too.”

*

“Good morning, Gerri,” Logan said, a little surprised, as he walked down to take his breakfast.

“Good morning, Logan.”

“What are you doing here? Don't tell me those two clowns finallly showed up?”

“I brought you today’s papers.”

“A little below your pay grade, don’t you think?” Logan said, smiled a little as he sat down. She walked over, put them down on the table. His eyes fell on them.

“Oh, _fuck._ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bonus material: the super talented [ohnoshitjudas did an amazing and hilarious illustration of blond Greg](https://ohnoshitjudas.tumblr.com/post/641414467190702081/kamikaze), and this little fic was based on [this germ of an idea](https://iamtheremin.tumblr.com/post/641373272692441088/kamikaze) that I posted. I feel like peak obsessive me would have made this into a twenty part caper lol but at least now it has an ending :)


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